Newscasts Silent On Bush’s High Approval Rating; Trumpet Anti-Life Position on ESCR

Last Thursday, Washington Post readers learned that “President Bush reaches the summer break in his first White House year buoyed by high personal approval but facing broad public doubts about his overall agenda and key policies, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.”

The story by David Broder and Dan Balz also revealed that “Bush has a 63 percent personal favorability rating in the poll and a 59 percent job approval score, the second-highest numbers recorded since he took office.”

That certainly sounds like news, but ABC, the Post’s partner-in-polling, didn’t tell viewers about the four-point increase in Bush’s approval ratings on either its World News Tonight or Good Morning America news programs. That’s in sharp contrast to the way ABC practically screamed the results of a survey released in the spring that showed a decline in the Bush’s popularity. Those poll results led ABC’s June 5 edition of World News Tonight:

“The really ominous thing in this poll for the Bush team is the movement it shows in public attitudes,” ABC’s Terry Moran related to substitute-anchor Charles Gibson. “The more people learn about this President, his policies, our poll suggests, the less they’re likely to support him.”

ABC knows all about their new poll, but the only portion they deemed “newsworthy” involved public support for the anti-life position on stem cell research. Anchor Elizabeth Vargas announced on the August 2 World News Tonight: “There is a new poll tonight from ABC News and the Washington Post which finds that 63 percent of Americans support embryonic stem cell research; 33 percent oppose it. For several months President Bush has been trying to decide if he will continue federal funding for this research. It could lead to treatments for many serious diseases and injuries, but it involves the destruction of human embryos. So far the debate has largely taken place in hearing rooms and press conferences, but in Odessa, Texas, it has a human face.”

The human face in the ABC report belonged to a paralyzed football player who could theoretically benefit from the proposed research, not a toddler such as two-year old Hannah Strege, a one-time frozen embryo who was saved from the trash bin by her adoptive parents, Jack and Marlene. She’s evidently the wrong kind of human face, just like the public’s growing support of President Bush made for the wrong kind of news.

(AgapePress) – A pro-family advocate is praising the John Ashcroft Justice Department for its crackdown on the world’s largest known commercial child pornography ring.

Federal authorities have arrested 100 consumers, producers, and distributors of some of the vilest forms of child pornography. The two-year investigation into Landslide Productions, Inc., yielded a 1,335-year jail sentence for company owner Thomas Reedy, and a 14-year sentence for his wife, Janice. Authorities say the couple used millions of dollars from the operation to fund a lavish lifestyle.

Hundreds of children were used in photos and videotapes and offered for sex through Landslide's subscriber-based operation in Fort Worth, Texas. Most of the pornography originated outside the U.S. Landslide took in as much as $1.4 million a month from people seeking access.

Pat Trueman is director of governmental affairs for the American Family Association. The former Justice Department official says the conviction and length of sentencing sends a much-needed message. “I’m pleased at the length of these sentences because it indicates to the public how serious it is to traffic in child pornography,” Trueman says.

Trueman believes even more significant than the conviction and length of sentencing for these child pornography offenders, is the Justice Department’s commitment to using the full extent of the law to track down those who are trafficking in child porn.

“This indicates a change in the attitude of the Department of Justice from the Clinton years, to now the Bush years,” he says. “This Justice Department is making the prosecution of child pornography and, I might add, obscenity, a criminal justice priority. And that is what we have asked for and we’re beginning to see it today.”

During eight years as U.S. Attorney General under Bill Clinton, Janet Reno refused to enforce an entire section of the federal criminal code that prohibits trafficking of obscene materials.